On the Nature of Dreams
by SteamedBun
Summary: Why did Sayuri's grandfather Ekusun build the tower? What was its purpose? Here is one possible answer to that pivotal question. A fanfic on The Place Promised in Our Early Days.


On the Nature of Dreams

Disclaimer: The Place Promised in Our Early Days belongs to someone. I know Makoto Shinkai directed it at least.

By Steamed Bun

* * *

"Grandpa, you're not listening to me!" 

My granddaughter glowers slightly as I shake my head, willing myself out of my drowsiness.

"Aaa…Sorry about that."

"You were saying something about school?" I do my best to guess.

"Wrong." She frowns. "If you're not even going to try to listen, I might as well not tell you."

I chuckle slightly, repeating my apology.

She sits down on the arm of my chair and continues.

"There was this beautiful white plane in the sky…and it was almost just sitting there, like it was waiting for something."

Ahh…she's talking about her dreams again.

She continues, adding gestures.

"It was pretty much the only thing there that moved…yet somehow…"

I nod, motioning for her to continue her story, even as I sink back into the cushions.

I think this chair is far too comfortable...

* * *

"Sir? Are you alright?" 

Just a dream…

"Sorry about that. How is the connection?"

I shake my head of its fog. We've been up for hours, working nonstop to get the tower operating.

Needless to say, our performance has been rapidly decreasing.

"We're still trying to find it. We've adjusted the parameters on the nanonet to match the model you gave us, but…"

I peer closely at the screen.

"They're going to need some fine tuning before they work." I tell him.

"Do we even know which parameter which should start with?" He asks raising an eyebrow. "Choosing them at random would take us decades, even with all our computing power."

I shake my head. "I've written a genetic algorithm for this problem. It should reduce the time required by several orders of magnitude."

He nods in surprise and takes the disk I hand to him.

It'll still probably take a couple of hours.

I should take this time to catch a few hours of sleep.

But the mind is a rather obstinate thing, and I find myself dwelling instead on the here and now.

The tower is nearly complete.

An enormous building, a great scientific achievement that represents the leaps and bounds that Union science has made. An incredible experimental apparatus, one that has the power to change the very nature of matter, the very nature of reality.

And secretly, to many of us at this facility, a beacon of hope. A passageway to a different place, a different time.

A time when…

I received a letter a couple years ago. It was from the other side, and as a result, highly illegal.

My wife has died. So have my daughter and her husband.

I have not seen my wife and daughter for twenty two years, and will never see them again.

I have never seen my son in law, and will never see the two of them together.

I have never seen my granddaughter, and probably never will.

"Sir!"

I look up in surprise.

"We are approaching resonance! Amplitude on the conversion wave is increasing!"

Around me, tired faces look up in joy. Hope springs forth once more, hope that has slowly been whittled away these long twenty two years.

"Narrow the algorithm weights! Try to get it as close to resonance as possible!"

Someone off to the left cheers for joy.

"We have a visible perturbation! Matter conversion is at one millimeter radius and increasing!"

"Only about forty thousand more calculations to go before the final product!"

"Get the stability program up and running!"

"The algorithm has finished! Nanonet is in final configuration. Resonance has been achieved."

There is an awed silence for a few moments, broken only by the soft beeps of our equipment.

I smile and sink back in my chair.

"We've done it. We have finally done it."

Around me, people are congratulating each other, shaking hands, shaky grins of joy on their faces.

It's only a short while before we can make a stable gateway.

Only a matter of time.

I look at the console in front of me.

An alarm is beeping.

The technician on my right notices it too and enters a few queries.

Her eyes widen.

"Sir! The rate of expansion is rapidly increasing!"

Around me, people are rushing frantically back to their consoles.

"The radius has hit one tenth of a meter! It's still growing!"

"Get those nanonets off resonance! Adjust parameters 269 and 361 now!" I yell.

"We can't! We engaged the stability locks just a couple minutes ago! It'll take several minutes before we can get the program to change modes again!"

I begin typing furiously, doing my best to control the phenomenon.

"It's at 10 meters! It's rapidly nearing the facility!"

Behind me, someone bolts out of their chair at a dead run.

Several others do the same.

But the rest of us…We know it is too late.

Hands slow, the sound of typing ceases.

I hear a prayer from my left.

The wave front will reach us in a matter of seconds, and there is nothing to do but hope.

Hope that what we created is what we have dreamed.

Hope that what we had wished to know, would be what we had wished it would be.

Time slows, and I watch as the blackness of the expanding conversion wave envelopes me.

* * *

I wake to the pouting face of my granddaughter, only a few inches away. 

"Did you fall asleep again grandpa? And I was just getting to the good part…" She trails off.

"…Are you crying?"

I wipe away the lone tear that trickles down my face and hug her tightly.

"Bad dreams again grandpa?" She asks, burrowing deeper into my embrace.

"Aaa…Just a dream of a different time."

Just a dream.

* * *

AN: Never, ever take physics lessons from anime. And most definitely do not take them from fanfiction based on aforementioned anime. 

I have been notified that this fic is far too confusing. That being said, I am at a loss as to finding a way to fix this without ruining the story. Thus, a mini explanation.

First, I believe the movie said that the tower changes matter into matter from a parallel universe. From there, it's not that big a leap to think that it could be a gateway into other worlds, for example, ones where the separation never took place.

Second, I think that the dreams that are able to access these other universes are hereditary; not just Sayuri, but her grandfather is also able to access these times and places in dreams.

Now, the primary question I want the story to leave open is whether the Ekusun Tsukinoe from the first part, the second part, and the third part are the same person.

Did the grandfather in the movie succeed in going to a parallel universe where there was no separation, and he is reminiscing on how he achieved this?

Is it a different universe where the grandfather dreams of the failure or success of his counterpart to reach his dream?

Or is it three entirely separate universes dreaming of each other?


End file.
